Regular and Irregular Correspondences: Adiabatic Invariants in Classical and Quantum Mechanics

We outline a rather extraordinary series of similarities between classical and quantal behavior in the limit of adiabatic time changes. These include the power laws for the goodness of the respective invariants for isolated eigenstates and invariant tori for integrable systems, the nature of the breakdown of the invariances—level crossing in quantum systems and the role of ever present non-linear resonances is examined in the case of generically non-integrable classical dynamics—and the perhaps surprising relationship for fully chaotic systems where sufficiently slow switching in either classical or quantal systems precisely preserves the number of energy levels up to a given energy. For suitably small values of Planck's constant these similarities yield clear examples of the Bohr correspondence principle linking classical and quantum mechanics; for larger values the details in the classical picture are quenched in the quantum.